The busy new chief executive of Zenith watches, Jean-Frederic Dufour, has assumed the helm only in the past few months and already he's on his second trip to Hong Kong. Despite his familiarity with this city, he's preparing for his first trip to Macau since 1999 and he's not sure what to expect.
'I'm performing a necessary market-check,' he said. 'I'll go see the shops, see what is going on. I think it's good to leave the office. It's very important in my role to get out of the office, to get into the field and see what is happening there; to understand how it's going and who is doing what.'
This hands-on leader has a background in engineering and had a seven-year history with Chopard prior to joining Swiss watchmaker Zenith, but insists that he has learned about watches on the job. Hailing from a family of engineers and mechanics, Dufour said: 'I've been involved in how things work my entire life, so I suppose it's easy for me to understand watches. But, by being passionate you can learn many things.'
Learning to handle arguably the world's most beloved watch movement as it turns 40 has been Dufour's greatest on-the-job lesson so far. El Primero has been a symbol of excellence since it launched as the first - and, to date, only - integrated automatic chronograph movement capable of measuring short periods of time accurate to one-tenth of a second.
In 1969, when El Primero was created, the international 'space race' was in full stride and men were landing on the moon.
In another attempt at a great leap forward, linguists and politicians were touting Esperanto as a solution for conducting business globally: the conceived language was meant to become the universal language of business, and in Esperanto the El Primero 400 expressed the 'concept of humanistic universality', according to Zenith.
The El Primero movement makes no concessions to anything unessential. The calibre requires a total of nine months of work, needs up to 50 separate operations per piece and demands 50 separate grinding operations for the bridge dimensions. It takes 20 watchmakers to assemble one movement and no fewer than 18 different metals are used to manufacture the 354 moving parts of El Primero. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of this legendary movement, Zenith has launched two special series celebrating the first timepiece to be fitted with the legendary El Primero calibre: The Originals and New Vintage 69. Within these sleek and seemingly uncomplicated cases lies a masterpiece of watchmaking and these two limited editions are available during 2009 only.